Saturday, September 17, 2005

The Turd

I walked into the hospital room to visit my mother, two days after she had a pacemaker implanted in her chest.
She lay in the bed pale and immobile with her eyes shut and mouth gaping open. I assumed she had not moved since my visit earlier in the day, had not left the bed since a difficult stumble onto the commode the day before the surgery. She had lost much of her mobility in the past month or two, since a previous hospitalization.
"Go ahead and take a break," I told Jona, her caregiver, who was helping her with meals and whatever she needed.
After she left, I saw a small round brown ball on the floor.
Kind of like the fake turd my daughter Roz likes to leave in the bathroom, along with plastic cockroaches, as a joke.
I picked it up with bare hands.
It was not fake.
"But this is a nice hospital," I thought to myself. "How can there be a turd on the floor?"
I threw it in the toilet, cleaned the floor, washed my hands, and forgot about it.
Until three days later, when my mother announced, as I was serving her lunch, "I'm having a BM!"
Not waiting to call an aide, I swung into action and managed to get her almost on the commode before much happened. Afterward an aide came and helped me clean her up and clean the floor.
By the time Jona returned, Mom was lying in bed, dressed and ready to leave the hospital, looking as peaceful as if nothing had happened.
But now I had an idea or two about how that turd got there.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

EWWWWWW!

A Linstatter said...

Sorry, babe.